Speaking at Microsoft Ignite 2016, Atlanta

Microsoft Ignite 2016 is the biggest, most important yearly conference in the world! A conference that is attended by more than 20 000 people (yes, you read that right) and has the best (and in hundreds) speakers from the whole world.

This year, after not being accepted last year, I am happy and feel privileged to share that I(and respectively 356labs) were accepted to speak at Microsoft Ignite 2016.

My sessions are the following:

Live Presentation Transformation: From Boring to Effective – in this one I will go completely demo only! I will take the typical badly designed slideshow and teach how everyone(non designers too) can create stunning, yet effective slides for their presentations

Sway: The Interesting New World of IT Presentations – and in this one I will show how Microsoft Sway can be used to deliver a top rated IT talk. Many people still don’t know about Sway, so what better moment to learn about it.

Wish me good luck and to all of my friends in Bulgaria – we will organize an event immediately after I come back from Ignite in order to share the overall experience and the leanings. I think it would be useful to everyone in the speaking / presenting community.

Update 1: Obviously, my first session got some serious attention because just a few days ago Microsoft asked me if it would be possible for me to deliver it twice in order for them to be able to handle all of the attendees that want to see it. Of course, I agreed without even thinking about it.

Update 2: At the end of the day, Microsoft were not able to organize the repeat of the session, but actually put my name on another one for Hybrid Cloud Storage. I am addressing this issues from the first time I noticed it (second day of the event) and up until now (October 5th) it’s still there.

Update 3: The main take away from the conference now. Here’s the thing. Microsoft Ignite is probably one of the biggest conferences in the world. With 25 000 attending it is seriously hard for you to imagine how much people this actually is, how many rooms there were and what’s more interesting – how you organize breakfast and lunch for so many people. The latter was done just incredibly well and to be honest, almost everything at the conference was on a very high level. The expo area had almost 2000 companies you can network with and the sessions were more than 1400.

As for my sessions:

The first one started a bit problematic as the display on which I was presenting died just when I connected to it. 5 people from MSFT were trying to fix it for almost 10 minutes with no success and I thought it’s Game Over and they will cancel the session. However, they made it work magically and I was able to start. The talk went perfectly well and there was some serious interest after it! Here are the resources I used together with the slides:

The second one that was on Sway went completely smooth! No issues what so ever and yeah, as it was 95% demo, there are not that many slides. However, the key takeaways are there, so sharing them here just for info:

What else can I say? I am already looking forward to Microsoft Ignite 2017 in Orlando!